While setting up Ubuntu 13.04 on an Asus X75A, I encountered a most frustrating error message on the wireless networking: “Wi-fi disabled by hardware switch”. Having just used the interface in Windows, I knew it shouldn’t be disabled, but I tried the key combination to toggle it to no avail anyway. The card was Atheros AR9485 using module asus-nb-wmi
, and the fix was pretty simple. That module needed to be blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
.
Just open that file in your favorite text editor (mine is vim; YMMV), add the directive to the end of the file, save and reboot.
Open the file.
$ sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
Add this line to the end.
blacklist asus-nb-wmi
Your wifi card will work after you reboot.
Thanks to Sleep for the post that put an end to my relentless searching. As you can see from my post, I don’t really have anything to add to the referenced method. I just wanted to get the X75A model tied to this problem, as my search results were not very useful.